Reviews, July 2015

Warlock of the Witch World —
Andre Norton
Estcarp, book 4

1967’s
Warlock
of the Witch World
is the sequel to Norton’s 1965 Three
Against the Witch World.
Having journeyed east to Escore, a long forgotten part of their
world, siblings Kyllan (the warrior), Kemoc (the scholar), and
Kaththea (the witch) are now caught up in the war between light and
darkness that divides that ancient land.

Rather
inconveniently for the siblings, they will find themselves divided in
their choice of allies: light or darkness? Are they sure which side
is which?

NVSQVAM (nowhere) —
Ann Sterzinger

Ann
Sterzinger’s 2011 novel NVSQVAM
(nowhere)
establishes its protagonist Lester Reichartsen as a rather unlikable
fellow on its very first page. If asked, Lester would doubtless
explain that he’s prickly because he is suffering. Cue litany of
woe: a decade ago he was kicked out of his band; he had to marry his
pregnant girlfriend Evelyn (so self-centered that she refused an
abortion!); he can’t stand the resulting kid; he isn’t keen on his
faculty colleagues; he hates his thesis topic, the students he has to
teach, and the southern Illinois town where he and his family live;
he hates his dad; and he’s not fond of the family cat.

The Red: First Light —
Linda Nagata
Red Trilogy, book 1

Linda Nagata’s Nebula-nominated The
Red: First Light
is the first volume in Linda Nagata’s Red Trilogy.

At
first glance, life in Nagata’s near-future seems pretty sweet. Many
of the civil liberties that have long been such an onerous burden to
hard-working Americans have been set aside, allowing them to focus on
more important matters. Lieutenant James Shelley is a fine example:
in another life he might have wasted his life as a political
activist, agitating against wars and other profitable activities. In
this life, his first attempt at political activism prompted a firm
response from the government that stands in loco parentis over all its subjects. One plea bargain later and Shelly became a hard-working
member of America’s military forces serving overseas.

If
that wasn’t wonderful enough, the same advances in neurological
interfaces that allow Shelley and his fellow soldiers to function as
a Linked Combat Squad allow his minders to keep an eye on what he is
doing, or even feeling, pretty much 24/7.

Emma —
Kaoru Mori
Emma, book 1

No,
not the Jane Austen Emma.
Aside from nation of origin and sex, Kaoru Mori’s Emma
has almost nothing in common with the more famous Emma;
neither class, occupation, personal character, nor personal history.

Emma
has no money, no family, no surname, and she owes her position as a
maid (and her education and her glasses) to retired governess Mrs.
Stowner’s generosity. Despite her lack of prospects, she gets lots of
offers, being a comely lass. But Emma has no interest in matrimony

And
then one day, Mrs. Stowner’s former student William Jones comes to
pay his (extremely belated) respects to his former governess….

Zoo City —
Lauren Beukes

Lauren
Beukes’ 2010 novel Zoo
City
takes us to a fantastic South Africa where magic is real, where
transgressions will saddle people with familiars, life-long magical
animal companions, where corruption, crime and betrayal still work
just the same way as they do in our world.

Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of the War of the Worlds —
Jeff Wayne

No
one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century,
that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of
space. No one could have dreamed we were being scrutinized, as
someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply
in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life
on other planets and yet, across the gulf of space, minds
immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes,
and slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us.

Ever
since its publication in 1897 (1898 if you don’t count serialization
as publication), H. G. Wells’ The
War of the Worlds
has been adapted to a variety of media: stage, radio, comic
book, and, of course, movies, each one worse than the one before.

And
of course, there was the concept album, Jeff Wayne’s Musical
Version of the War of the Worlds, whose introduction I quote above.

Operation Time Search —
Andre Norton

1967’s
Operation
Time Search
is a stand-alone. Spoiler warning.

By
the far off year of 1980, the people of Earth—or at least an
Earth—have done a pretty good job of using up all the resources of
their world. Other worlds beckon, but rather than reaching across
space, the researchers Hargreaves and Fordham have cast their eyes
across time, with some success. Their time probes have reached
something, somewhere, somewhen—the past, or perhaps some alternate
world—but it’s definitely not modern Ohio.

Thus
far, Hargreaves and Fordham have settled for peering through time;
physical transportation is for later. Or at least that was the plan
until photographer Ray Osborne snuck onto the Indian mound the
researchers had commandeered. Hargreaves and Fordham’s device may not
have been intended to catapult physical objects through time, but as
Ray discovers, it is nevertheless quite capable of punting the young
man all the way from modern Ohio to … somewhere.

Somewhere
wild. Somewhere with old growth forests of a kind not seen in North
America for centuries or more. Somewhere where Ray is almost
immediately captured by soldiers from a place called Atlantis,
soldiers who suspect that Ray is an agent of Mu….

Black Lagoon, Volume One —
Rei Hiroe
Black Lagoon, book 1

Although one might argue that this book is at best marginally SF, as the only aspects that seem at all speculative are the alternate laws of physics to which some of the characters appear to have access.

The
crew of the repurposed WWII-era torpedo boat Black
Lagoon
(Vietnam War vet Dutch, nihilistic gun nut Revy, and hacker Benny)
don’t bother with the conflicted personal histories of a Drake
protagonist or the shiny white aura of a Pournelle mercenary. On the
grand moral scale of sell-swords, they’re well towards the
unabashed-villains end of the scale. The only reason they’re at all
sympathetic is because their enemies are even more depraved (and because the plots conspire to keep them from giving in their their worst impulses).

Enter
the unfortunate Rokuro “Rock” Okajima, a salaryman who has the
great misfortune to be in possession of a computer disk the Russian
Mafia hired the crew of the Black Lagoon to … acquire. The crew
have no problem snatching the disk and as an extra cherry on the
sundae, they snatch the hapless Okajima as well. Why not? If he
proves useless, they can always toss his bullet-riddled corpse over
the side.

Many,
many role-playing game companies have been tempted into doing RPG
adaptations of established media franchises, such as books, TV shows,
or movies. The attraction is obvious; the product comes with a
built-in market. Unfortunately, there are also many, many pitfalls.
Many of the companies who have dabbled in licensed products have
emerged from the experience poorer for it. There’s a trick to
surviving adaptations and not every company has it.

Way
back in 1983, I was thrilled to read in Different
Worlds 29

that Chaosium Games had acquired the rights to do a role-playing
game based on Larry Niven’s Ringworld
(a title that did not at that time inspire feelings of melancholy and
despair over the decline of a once-great author). Not only had
Chaosium created Runequest,
one of my favourite RPGs, but they had ample experience at turning
literary properties into games [1]. By 1983, Chaosium’s licensed
products included Thieves
World,
Stormbringer,
and of course Call
of Cthulhu.

It’s not entirely true to
say that Ringworld
the RPG got caught up in Development Hell but I do think it’s safe to
say the project turned out to be bigger than John Hewitt or any of
the other people involved could have envisioned. Despite delays,
Larry
Niven’s Ringworld: Roleplaying Adventure Beneath the Great Arch was
finally released in 1984 [2].

And
what did a youthful James find when he popped open his copy of the game?

Always —
Nicola Griffith
Aud Torvingen, book 3

2007’s
Always
is the third (and as-of-this-date final) volume in Nicola Griffith’s
Aud
Torvingen
[1] mystery series. The book opens with Aud far from Atlanta (where
she makes her home), visiting Seattle to meet her mother’s new
husband. She also plans to deal with an investment that isn’t doing
as well as it should be.

Aud
is a very straightforward person, brusque to the point that she may
seem to have a social disability. She does not hesitate to bring the
metaphoric hammer down on her local property manager, Karenna
Beauchamps Corning, blaming her for the way Aud’s property is
under-performing. As Aud soon discovers, there’s more to the story
than one lax property manager: someone
is going to a lot of trouble to sabotage the businesses that lease
Aud’s property

The Hostage of Zir —
L. Sprague de Camp
Krishna, book 4

L. Sprague
de Camp’s 1977 novel The
Hostage of Zir
is part of de Camp’s Viagens
Interplanetarias
series, his attempt to come up with a swords and blasters setting
that made sense.

Relativistic
flight gave humans access to the nearer stars, many of which had
habitable worlds. Most of the worlds also had native inhabitants.
While some of these alien worlds were as technologically
sophisticated as Earth, the natives of worlds like Tau Ceti’s Krishna
and Epsilon Eridani’s Kukulkan were comparatively primitive. The
Interplanetary Council instituted strict limits on the importation of
advanced technology to these backward worlds. Given that supposedly
civilized peoples, Americans and Russians, had already devastated the
Earth’s northern hemisphere, the IC did not want to find out just
what primitives might do with such powerful weapons.

Contact
and trade are still allowed, within the limits of the law. Many
Terrans have ventured out of the port city of Novorecife, on Krishna,
to explore that diverse and interesting world. Several of them lived
long enough to return. Now Krishna is going to be opened to broader
tourism … which may prove unfortunate for Krishnans and tourists alike

Servant of the Underworld —
Aliette De Bodard
Obsidian and Blook, book 1

Aliette
De Bodard’s 2010 novel, Servant
of the Underworld,
is the first of her Acatl novels. For some reason I had the
impression these were straight-up mysteries set in the Aztec capital
of Tenochtitlan. There’s definitely a strong mystery element; her
protagonist, Acatl, would certainly find much in common with Benny
Cooperman, Philip Marlowe, and Hercule Poirot. The main difference
would be that none of those famous detectives ever had to deal with a
living god. For Acatl, High Priest of Mictlantecuhtli, dealing with
the gods is a daily reality.

A
mysterious summons draws Acatl, priest to the god of the dead, out of
his own temple and into the House of Tears, a school for girls. There
he learns that the priestess Eleuia has been abducted. Her room is
splashed with enough blood to cast her survival into doubt. Not only
that … it is clear that she has been carried off by some occult means.

Another
thing is clear; the list of possible suspects is very short and the
man at the top of that short list is Acatl’s own older brother, the
warrior Neutemoc.

Moon of Three Rings —
Andre Norton
Moon Singer, book 1

1966’s
The Moon
of Three Rings
is the first volume in Norton’s Moon Singer
series.

Yiktor
appears to be just another world among millions, a world once home to
an advanced civilization now long vanished, just as so many
civilizations have flourished, then vanished, across the galaxy. Now
Yiktor is a world whose current population is (seemingly) trapped in
barbarism. To Free Traders, it is a possible source of valuable trade
goods. To a greedy Combine seeking worlds to conquer, Yiktor looks
like easy pickings. As they will learn, the great civilization that
called Yiktor home is not extinct, but merely evolved beyond recognition.

A Bride’s Story, Volume Two —
Kaoru Mori
A Bride's Story, book 2

Ideally
one starts an ongoing series with volume one … but sometimes life
is not ideal. What I actually have on hand is volume two of Kaoru
Mori’s manga series
A Bride’s Story, so that’s where I
began. First published in 2010
as 乙嫁語りor
Otoyomegatari, the English language translated version
was released only a year later.

In
the previous volume, Amir, a young woman of a nomadic Turkic tribe
roaming somewhere near the Caspian sea, was married to Karluk, whose
people are sedentary. As was customary for this time and place, the
marriage is not a love match but a political alliance. The marriage
forms a bridge between the two communities. Neither the bride nor the
groom had much say in the arrangement. Nevertheless, Amir and Karluk
seem compatible enough. With time and effort, they should be able to
forge a solid family.

The Lives of Tao —
Wesley Chu
Tao, book 1

Wesley
Chu’s 2013 debut novel The Lives of Tao appears to be
warmly regarded, if one can judge by its 3.77 stars on Goodreads and
4 stars on Amazon. Once again I find myself out of step with the
majority of readers. Welcome to yet another installment in “Nobody
Cares Why You Hate Shakespeare, Leo,” with me playing the starring
role of Leo Tolstoy.

Betrayed
by a fellow agent, Edward Blair does what he can to salvage the
situation by leaping from the top of an office building to certain
death below. This is rather hard on Blair, but it frees Tao, Blair’s
alien symbiont, to seek a new host who isn’t about to be captured by
the enemy. Tao must find that host quickly, before Earth’s hostile
atmosphere kills him. Alas for Tao, the only possible human host
close enough is an out of shape, self-loathing programmer named Roan Tan.

It
was mere luck that Tan was close to where Blair went splut. Bad luck,
because thanks to it Tan finds himself drafted into a covert civil
war raging across the Earth.

I could have decided to reread and
review Donald Wollheim’s 1959 novel The Secret of the Ninth Planetas part of an epic reread of the entire SF
series published by Winston … but I
didn’t. I decided to reread and review this book because it happens
to be one of the few books which fall in the intersection of the
following sets: 1) books in which Pluto plays a significant role, and
2) books of which I actually have a copy [1]. Today is, of course, the day when the American space probe New Horizons had its close encounter with Pluto, turning what was a dot on a photgraphic plate into this:

Go, applied science! And now, back to Pluto as it was imagined in 1959.

The years since Sputnik have seen great
strides in manned [2] rocket travel to near space and the Moon, and
in unmanned space travel to other worlds. As far as young Burl
Denning knows, manned flight to other planets will have to wait until
something better than the current primitive rockets comes along. What
Burl doesn’t know is that the necessary advances in propulsion have
already been made. Just not by humans.

Humans are not the first or most
advanced civilization to develop space travel. One of humanity’s
neighbors is working on a scheme that will doom life across the Solar System!

James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon —
Julie Phillips

Anyone
setting out to write a biography of a revered author could do a lot
worse than to take Julie Phillips’ 2006 biography, James
Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon,
as a model. It’s that good.

The Green Ripper —
John D. MacDonald
Travis McGee, book 18

John
D. MacDonald’s 1979 novel The
Green Ripper
will always be a special book to me. In some respects, this book has
not aged well and my review is going to face that fact head on. But
it is the very first Travis McGee novel that I ever read and that
counts for something.

(I
know where I bought this but for the life of me I cannot recall why I
bought it; I didn’t get into mysteries in a big way until a few years
after 1980. My suspicion is that the decision to pick up this novel
was one part eye-catching green cover and one part laudatory
references to MacDonald by reviewers like Spider Robinson.)

McGee
is an aging adventurer, a man with a bewildering list of odd skills
picked up from friends, acquaintances, and lovers (so many lovers)
over the course of a long, colourful career as a problem-solver and
salvage expert.

At
the beginning of
The Green Ripper,
McGee’s career as a two-fisted man of action seems fated to come to a
well-earned end. In the course of the seventeenth book in the series,
The
Empty Copper Sea,
McGee encountered something he hadn’t thought possible: a lover
(Gretel Howard) with whom he could imagine spending the rest of his life.

McGee
isn’t going to spend the rest of his life with Gretel. Gretel is,
however, going to spend the remainder of her life with him.

Let The Right One In —
John Ajvide Lindqvist

I
needed something to review for Saturday (all the remaining
commissioned reviews are waiting on books yet to arrive). John Ajvide
Lindqvist 2004’s novel Låt
den rätte komma in
(published in English as Let
The Right One In)
seemed like just the right book for a quiet Thursday evening: young
protagonist, exotic location [1], a hint of the supernatural. I’ve
read Swedish juvenile fiction so I have a pretty clear idea where
this would lead: one part Pippi Longstocking to one part Kalli
Blomqvist, am I right?

The Year of the Unicorn —
Andre Norton
High Hallack, book 2

1965’s
The Year
of the Unicorn
takes us back to the Witch World, across the ocean to High Hallack.
Gillan has lived among the people of that land for almost as long as
she can remember, but her skin and hair brand her an outsider. She
can be thankful that she is not one of the hated Alizon, High
Hallack’s great enemy, but she can never hope to be truly accepted by
those among whom she lives. A quiet life in a rustic abbey may be
Gillan’s best option.

The Way into Magic —
Harry Connolly
The Great Way, book 2

When last we saw our heroes, monsters from another dimension had swarmed out of an inter-dimensional gateway to overwhelm the Morning City and then the Peradaini empire (of which the Morning City had been the capital). As the cast of characters dwindled rapidly (in a way that those of us with crappy memories appreciate) the survivors have gained a realistic understanding of their situation.

The empire is dead, although parts of it remain unconquered by the invaders. But it gets worse.

Last First Snow —
Max Gladstone
Craft Sequence, book 4

The thing to bear in mind about Gladstone’s Craft series is that while it has an internal order, that’s not the order in which Gladstone is publishing them. The titles suggest an internal chronology, but the title of 2015’s Last First Snow is a bit ambiguous on that point.

It is forty years after the God Wars, when craft-wielding mages overthrew the gods. The city of Dresediel Lex is a well-ordered oasis in the middle of a vast desert. It is a city freed from the superstitions of the past and from the oppression of chattel slavery, a vibrant community whose economy is growing quite nicely. At least that’s the point of view of the King in Red, the skeletal autocrat who runs the city. If you cannot trust your dictator, whom can you trust?

The one sore point in the King in Red’s otherwise satisfactory eldritch post-life

I hadn’t actually planned to write a review today, because I knew I would be spending Saturday [1] moving enough wood to fuel the campfires for the upcoming FASS camping weekend. Turned out that three determined people can move a lot of dead trees very quickly. Fortunately, I had packed a paperback just in case [2].

White Trash Zombie Apocalypse picks up a few months after the conclusion of Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues. Angel Crawford is still working at the parish Coroner’s Office and as far as she knows, the biggest crisis facing her is her looming GED test. It’s just too bad for Angel that while the parasite responsible for zombification confers on its hosts a number of useful abilities, a facility for studying isn’t one of them.

Even the zombies shuffling around town don’t alarm Angel much, because they’re just extras from a horror film being filmed in Tucker Point, Louisiana.

The Persistence of Vision —
John Varley

The tragedy of John Varley’s 1978 collection, The Persistence of Vision, isn’t that its contents have aged; although time has not been kind to some of them, others have fared well. The tragedy is the stark contrast between the John Varley of the 1970s and the John Varley of today. Young Varley was one of the few male authors of note to emerge in the disco era, the author of a remarkable series of short works [1]. The mature Varley wastes his talent on second-rate Heinlein pastiches [2] and novels whose moral is that, as bad as the collapse of civilization would be, at least it would turn women back into homemakers and get the kids off the Twitter.

To quote a noted social activist, “Why are so few of us left active, healthy, and without personality disorders?”

The Necessary Beggar —
Susan Palwick

While she had been actively publishing at shorter lengths, Susan Palwick’s 2005 book The Necessary Beggar ended a thirteen year novel publication drought, a return to longer form her fans certainly appreciated. Inexplicably, despite counting myself among those fans, this is the first time I have ever read this novel [1]. Having finally read it, I regret having delayed gratification so long.

No one in Lémabantunk knows why Darroti murdered Mendicant Gallicina; Darroti won’t explain and of course Gallicina cannot. Darroti’s punishment is the harshest the city can exact: exile through a one-way gateway to another universe, to an alien nation calling itself America.

The X Factor —
Andre Norton

Andre Norton was never known for bright shiny futures but 1965’s The X Factor is a gloomier novel than most of her books. Protagonist Diskan Fentress is a large, clumsy man who feels like a subhuman; he sees himself as suitable for nothing save brute labour. He has recently been reunited with the Scout father who left before he was born. Diskan believes that he falls far short of his father, Renfrey Fentress, in every conceivable way (a belief that Renfrey does nothing to correct). To rub more salt in the wound, the aliens with whom Renfrey has made his home are to Diskan’s eye without fault. Their perfection only highlights Diskan’s flaws.

Better to turn criminal than suffer under the lash of charity. Diskan steals a starship and a navigation tape (to a world his father had marked as anomalous) and heads up and out. He is lucky enough to reach his destination and survive a bad landing whole and largely unharmed. His luck would seem to have ended there. He is alone, poorly equipped, and trapped on a planet whose mysteries even his talented father was unable to unravel. What hope is there for poor, dim Diskan?

Trading in Danger —
Elizabeth Moon
Vatta's War, book 1

If I am going to review MilSF that doesn’t suck, at some point I need to address the Elizabeth Moon issue. On the one hand her books (or at least some of them) are clearly candidates. On the other hand, many of them have been published by Baen, whose publisher is a willing participant in this year’s attempt to nobble the Hugos. Baen is a company whose works I don’t review. A company that’s dead to me.

However … thanks to various events that are Googleable, Moon moved over to Del Rey. That company is not colluding in an attempt to nobble the Hugos and is not dead to me. The system works!

2003’s Trading in Danger kicks off Moon’s Vatta’s War series. Well-meaning Ky Vatta is booted out of the naval academy when a well-meaning attempt to help a friend results in a PR-disaster for the service. The navy doesn’t consider “meant well” a defense. Former cadet Ky finds herself on the curb outside the Academy, waiting for a ride home.

This is a bold opening gambit if the series as a whole is supposed to be military science fiction.